“In separation,” the Buddha said, “lies the world’s great misery.” This talk shows how awareness dissolves our personal sense of being separate selves. It also shows how awareness deconstructs the misery-making effects of social constructions that cause us to feel separate, and that we also take to be “self”: race, gender, sexual identity, and class.

Why is generosity a fundamental dharma issue? The dharma opens us beyond our self-limitations, and generosity is the essential direction of that opening. There is a balance between staying within ourselves and our understanding without idealizing the dharma while working with our edges that keep us contained within ourselves. Generosity is the authentic journey out of that container where we realize we were never alone or isolated. Generosity is the manifestation in action of connectedness and is the fundamental conduit of a life lived from the heart.